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By John Oates, 6 January 2000 00:15

NEWS The wireless industry has begun to identify a set of common problems faced by companies which would otherwise be fierce competitors At the most recent US NetEvents meeting in New Orleans - which brought together figures from the wireless and mobile industry - Dr John Langley, chief technical officer at RadioLAN, and Peter Murray, general manager of NoWiresNeeded pointed out the potential pitfalls for all industry players. Despite being competitors, both agreed on many of the issues the industry must address before being able to appeal to the mainstream business market. One of the principal problems the pair identified was the lead that wired network vendors have had in the campus area. Langley said: "Price and performance are major issues, but there is now a huge wired infrastructure." One of the factors in wireless networking's favour was the inevitable obsolescence of a cable network. Murray said: "Portability and mobility are important but also the cost of implementing adds moves and changes - if we're talking about old buildings and you have to pull a wire, is there asbestos there? Or if you have to pull a wire, do you need to reseal the wall because of fire protection?" Both men were at pains to lay out the difference between portability and mobility. Portability is defined as the occasional movement of hardware - for instance taking a laptop into a meeting room and keeping it connected to the network - while mobility is regular movement, such as that required for a PDA. Langley said: "Portability is more important in corporate network where large amounts of data need to be exchanged, whereas PDAs and this ilk can offer true mobility because they aren't required to handle as big a volume of data." Both also agreed that wireless networking was likely to be driven by home users who did not want more wires draped round the living room. This, they said, will drive down the cost of the hardware which will increase its attractiveness for business users. You can view the complete Head-to-Head programme in our Fast Networking Channel (http://www.silicon.com/a34911 ).